Arc & Seam

Farouk Goweda's poems as translated from the Arabic by Walid Abdallah and Andy Fogle give us an open and bleeding Earth, a world and a language begging to be healed, and by each of us. Goweda's poems don't get mixed up in nostalgia but yearn for something better than some heady version of the past. What I am struck with, reading these poems now, is how urgent these translations are: but the tools to repair are in all of our hands. The cultural and ecological merge as we encounter a language that is a plea, an outcry, a call to life across borders and difference.-Allison Grimaldi Donahue, translator of Carla Lonzi's Self-portrait